Since about the same time that cardamom joined salt and pepper in my spice cupboard, Indian culture in the United States has emerged from its urban enclaves and gone to the mall. Monsoon Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham are box office nirvana, pashminas are such old news that fashion slaves call them "has-been-a's," and Indian cuisine, once a tentative matter of curried chicken, is everywhere ascendant. Food has always eased the introduction of new cultures into ours. At first culinary ghettos keep the immigrants' dishes at arms' length—in Chinatown, say, or Little Italy, or Curry Row. Or relations are halting, with the wary natives accepting only the newcomers' "signature" dishes—egg rolls, pizza, tacos.

Simultaneously, Americans create our own diluted versions of foreign dishes by using more familiar ingredients: highway diner specials like "spaghetti with red, Italian-style sauce" and "Oriental stir-fry." As recently as ten years ago, in many parts of America, eating raw fish was considered daring. Now sushi places thrive far beyond big cities. The once baffling building blocks of once foreign foods—garlic, jerk sauce, wasabi, edamame, lemongrass—are absorbed into haute cuisine, into mainstream dining out, home cooking, defrosting, microwaving. They show up as dipping sauce at fast-food chains. Jerk Chicken McNuggets, anyone?

Not quite a recent import after all, cardamom is simultaneously being discovered and rediscovered. Discovered because its fresh, sweet, more-exotic-than-cinnamon flavor is new to many people; rediscovered because cardamom has always been here, hiding in plain sight, tucked between the oregano and the cloves and embedded in countless smorgasbords' worth of Swedish meatballs.

A mainstay of Scandinavian and Baltic cooking, Elettaria cardamomum, which comes in green or black pods or in powder form, often sweetens those northerners' breads and coffee cakes. In India, it's chewed as an after-meal digestive or cooked in meats and sweets. Some believe it's an aphrodisiac, and it does add a sexy edge to everything from pot roast to fruit cobbler. A touch of it stirred into creamy rice pudding turns a nursery dishe into grown-up dinner-party fare.

The instructions on the cardamom jar in aisle three (add to sweet potatoes or apple pie) suggest that this spice works for meals as American as Thanksgiving. In my house, we haven't yet figured out how to inject it into hot dogs, but we add it to burgers and pork chops cooked with onions and apples. Sudha Koul, the Kashmiri memoirist and author of the cookbook Curries Without Worries (who's soaked up some local customs during years of raising kids in New Jersey), says she likes to "throw cardamom and cinnamon into the meatloaf." So the meatloaf becomes a sort of kebab. The chopped onion can be replaced with garlic, the parsley with coriander. Some might call it a bastardization, but the shouldn't say that as if it's a bad thing!

Centuries from now, when food historians trace cardamom from the amber cooking fires of the subcontinent to Brooklyn to the Fourth of July picnic in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it will have mingled and mated with countless regional traditions. And as mixed marriages and multiethnic families continue to proliferate in this "everything bagel" of a country, cardamom is bound to end up not just in the meatloaf but in the tamales, too.